Center for PhAIge Therapy

Every year, about 5 million deaths around the world are associated with bacterial infections that stop responding to antibiotics.

The Center for PhAIge Therapy combines engineering and artificial intelligence to leverage the potential of phages—viruses that naturally infect and kill bacteria—as new treatment options for these drug-resistant infections.

Despite promising results in individual patients, phage therapy has remained difficult to use at a larger scale. The new research center will build the preclinical tools and models needed to overcome this obstacle and make phages a more reliable treatment for infections.

Gladstone scientists have already built AI to predict which phages work against a given bacterial strain, but those models need far more data to be accurate. In this center, the researchers are generating an unprecedented amount of data to train the models by using engineered phages and bacteria to better understand, step by step, how bacteria are killed.

The center was launched in 2026 through an initial award of $2 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), with additional funding of up to a total of $10 million available over the proposed 5-year project period. Gladstone is one of three institutions across the country selected to host the new Centers for Accelerating Phage Therapy to Combat ESKAPE Pathogens (CAPT-CEP) to advance the therapeutic use of phages.